Be The Dumbest Person In The Room

Why Redbeacon Was More Valuable To Me Than College

Growing up I prided myself on being smart. I learned to read relatively early, excelled at math as a child, and passed enough AP tests in high school to enter college as a sophomore. All of my confidence would soon be crushed, however, when I became the dumbest person in the room.

I really just got lucky and stumbled into Redbeacon, using my knack for sales to land a gig as a Wizard at the startup that was founded by 3 Ex-Googlers and hot off of its recent victory at Techrunch Disrupt. Over time I began to realize that Redbeacon is a team of superstars with a very, very selective process to hiring — if you’re not amazing and a great culture fit, it’s nearly impossible to make the cut.

I dropped out of college but am lucky enough to have been learning from graduates of Princeton, Harvard Business School, Dartmouth, Cal, MIT and Carnegie Mellon (to name a few) for the last two and a half years. One of our founders, Aaron Lee, is an active angel investor and is now the CTO of The Home Depot; our other founder, Yaron Binur, trained under Marissa Mayer in her Associate Product Manager program and founded a non-profit that unites the Israeli and Palestinian youth through technology. Our CEO worked with Jeff Bezos and was the COO of a publicly traded company. In a lot of ways, Redbeacon is an intense education with top-notch teachers— just one that pays instead of costs.

The experiences I’ve had at Redbeacon will inevitably pay off heartily and be worth every hour I’ve put in. By being the dumbest person in the room I was forced to listen to, observe, and appreciate the ways my colleagues went about identifying and solving problems. To say I was humbled at Redbeacon is an understatement. I don’t know if there is a better way to describe my experience so far at Redbeacon than this quote from Dave Hoover in Apprenticeship Patterns:

"Find a stronger team where you are the weakest member and have room to grow."